Vehicle-to-X communication, also referred to as car-to-X communication or C2X or V2X communication for short, is the state of research or advance development and is currently being standardized. In particular, this can be based on the standard IEEE 802.11p.
Since this communication concerns communication which is of very critical importance for road traffic, it is typically necessary to safeguard it against tampering. In particular, a method can be used for this purpose in which the communication is made verifiable with the aid of cryptographic checksums. These checksums are typically based on asymmetric cryptography methods, for example ECDSA. As the basis of this verification, all of the approved vehicles together with the public keys used by them are registered by means of a central infrastructure which can also be referred to as a public key infrastructure (PKI).
As has been demonstrated, verifying all of the incoming messages or messages received by a vehicle requires a great deal of processing power, making appropriate solutions very expensive. Instead of this so-called “verify all” approach, the so-called “verification on demand” approach has therefore already been developed, in which only those messages are checked which are deemed important by applications or which are classified as important by another algorithm. Therefore, a “verification on demand” approach saves a significant amount of processing power compared to a “verify all” approach.
Typically, an attempt is made to structurally combine those elements which are absolutely necessary for the vehicle-to-X communication or where the vehicle-to-X communication differs from other solutions already present in the vehicle. These are mainly a transceiver and security support. The applications can, however, be housed in part in already existing control units.
However, such a dispersed method of construction causes difficulties in the case of the “verification on demand” approach since the decision as to whether a message is important is made in a control unit where the implementation of the security solutions or security is missing, as the latter is/are housed in the unit which is specific to the vehicle-to-X communication.
In addition, the known concepts do not utilize the available computing capacity in an ideal manner.